As revealed by CRN last month, the firm announced its intention to get a foothold in the space through acquisition and working with a 'different breed of reseller' (CRN, 23 July). Last week, DNS Arrow's parent company DNS International Europe revealed it had reached an agreement to acquire UK-based Centia and Scandinavian-based AKS Group (CRN Online, 7 August).

Once the deal is closed, Centia will come under the control of DNS Arrow. Steve Pearce, managing director of the firm, told CRN it would mean more traction with vendors such as VMWare, PlateSpin, Neoware, Citrix and Vizioncore.

"The acquisition will strengthen our hand in the area of data storage and management, and working with vendors such as Citrix will open up new areas for our resellers."

Once the deal has gone through, Centia will remain a separate business, but the plan is to eventually bring everything under the DNS Arrow branding, Pearce added. He also said there would be no redundancies as a result of the deals.

"There has been minimum overlap and the office is situated very near to our Reading site. Centia has virtually all the skills that we need. We want people to stay."

Pearce also said DNS Arrow would continue with its acquisition strategy if more 'suitable targets' came along. "The consolidation of distribution is inevitable and Arrow Group intends to be one of the major driving forces. But we know it's not just about growing for the sake of growing, acquisitions have to be carefully considered."

Jon Collins, service director at analyst Freeform Dynamics, said: " Virtualisation is a massive growth space in terms of customer demand, especially with larger firms looking to make datacentres more efficient. It can also cut down the amount of hardware and allows resellers to offer some level of service to their customers."
DNS Arrow aims for virtualisation
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